There is a growing need for improving the management and administration of network services that use the Internet, especially email. One example of the current lack of adequate management and administration is the uncontrolled growth of spam (unsolicited) email, which is a nuisance for spam email recipients.
The strategies currently used to manage spam are filtering, public-key certificate based authentication, and challenge-response. Filtering strategies are not viable because it is impossible to generalize appropriate filters, and this leads to an increased risk of false-positives as higher levels of filtering are applied. Certificate based authentication strategies are presently premature due to the lack of a widely deployed infrastructure for the distribution and management of certificates. Challenge-response strategies are also limited because, instead of actually solving the problem, they merely transfer burdens to the senders of useful emails.
The reason for the explosion of spam emails is the ease with which senders can remain anonymous, without a correspondingly easy ability for recipients to distinguish between senders who intentionally hide their identity from those who do not. Once it is equally easy for recipients to distinguish anonymous and non-anonymous senders, the spam problem will work itself out.